It’s been business as usual for the Western Sugar Cooperative factory in Lovell following the early end to the 2019-20 campaign, with the factory crew engaging in several post-campaign maintenance projects, factory manager Shannon Ellis said.
Ellis said there were 115 employees on the factory crew during campaign, and an early fall hard freeze left approximately 30 percent of the sugar beets in the ground in the Lovell factory district, leading to a much shorter campaign than usual.
Courtesy photo
Instead of campaign winding up in mid-February or so, the final day of processing for 2019-20 was January 5, Ellis said. He said the short campaign led to the company holding over a few less people for the post-campaign maintenance period, but fortunately that did not require layoffs. The smaller number – 32 as of this week – was reached when a few quit or found other jobs, Ellis said.
“We were able to maintain a lower staff without layoffs,” he said.
In a typical post-campaign season, Ellis said, the maintenance crew goes through all of the equipment and checks bearings and seals while also engaging in major projects.
There are four major projects this year, Ellis said, the most notable being the replacement of the upper half of the steel shell on the number three evaporator, which is being done to maintain the integrity of the vessel.
“I think it was installed in the ‘80s, but that’s really a guess,” Ellis said when asked how old the evaporator is. There are six evaporators working in progression, he said.
An evaporator is a machine that boils out the water from the juice during sugar processing, almost like a pot of water on a stove, Ellis said. Each evaporator contains thousands of tubes that are an inch and a quarter in diameter and nine to 10 feet long. The juice flows into the middle of the evaporator and makes a circle as water is cooked off like a teakettle, he said. It takes about four hours to work through all six evaporators, he said.
“We replaced the tubes (in number three) last year and planned to complete the project this year in stages,” Ellis said.
The steel in the upper shell has been removed and is now being replaced with new steel one section at a time, he said.
Employees Scott Ayotte and Sam Gittlein have been instrumental in carrying out the evaporator project, Ellis said, noting that the two have taken the old steel out and have been doing a lot of welding and fabrication on the new shell to “make sure everything fits.”
Courtesy photo
Another employee, Levi Asay, has been helping with the project, as well, Ellis said.
There are three other major projects in the works, Ellis said:
• Rebuilding the number four (of five) pulp press by replacing the structural steel that supports the screens that recover additional sugar from pulp.
• Rebuilding the main gearbox on the diffuser, which extracts sugar out of the beets.
• Purchasing and installing dischargers for the white centrifugals, which scrape sugar off the centrifugals during the process of spinning off excess water. Ellis said he initially had the dischargers sent off for repair, and after finding they were not repairable, had to purchase new replacement units.
Ellis said the factory crew is shooting for starting the factory on September 1 for the new campaign “depending on the crop and how things go this summer.”
“That’s our target,” he said. “We’ll be ready by the first of September.”
COVID-19 steps
Asked if things have changed during the COVID-19 coronavirus orders, Ellis said the crew has been doing extra cleaning. Even night watchmen have been involved in “thorough cleaning,” he said.
“We’ve been trying to practice social distancing,” he said, noting that, instead of groups of workers getting together for normal maintenance meetings, supervisors are presenting the information one-on-one with the help of printouts.
By David Peck
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April 30, 2020 at 11:28PM
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Maintenance and repair projects keep sugar factory crew busy - Lovell Chronicle
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